


Running

by Tierfal



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Drama, F/M, General, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-30
Updated: 2010-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-06 19:56:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The whirling body jitters like an antique car engine, overtaken by the shuddering need to <i>run run run</i>, a need the man feels too but doesn't understand...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another [Metamorfic_Moon](http://community.livejournal.com/metamorfic_moon) fic, for the prompt "Well, you look about the kind of angel I'd get. Sort of a fallen angel, aren't you? What happened to your wings?" from _It's a Wonderful Life_.

He locks the bedroom door and twists the peeling gilt latch on the window, though some part of him knows it's woefully inadequate: insufficient, like every part of his heart and his home and the life that he's made.

The half-conscious hypothesis stands up to scrutiny as he kneels—kneels in the center of the room, stranded, lonesome, king of cobwebs and dust; as he curls, as he changes. Skin bubbles, bones creak, tufts of fur burst free until the seething-melting whole of him has become wholly something else.

The wolf snuffles at the trailing bedspread, dust catching in its whiskers, prickling in its nose, and bares its teeth at the door, at the rug, at the unadorned walls, with their patches of cleaner white where photographs of smiling people used to hang. Silver nails have left their pinprick signatures to mark the memory.

It is ironic, some sentient part of him thinks, that the man barricades himself in any ruined fortress he can find, but the wolf will not, cannot be contained.

Knobby vertebrae bulge from the spine, stretching the sleek fur over the line of little hills, and they crash heedlessly against the wooden chair as the animal hurls itself around the room, a growl vibrating deep in a throat that would murmur softly if it could speak. The whirling body jitters like an antique car engine, overtaken by the shuddering need to _run run run_, a need the man feels too but doesn't understand, a need he helplessly obeys, a need the wolf eagerly and actively seeks—

The chair-back hits the window at just the right angle to make the brittle glass crack and give, jagged shards littering the scuffed hardwood within and the hush of snow beyond. The wolf scampers back, leather-coated forepaws skidding in the dust, and runs and leaps and _flies_, and the windowpane's cold canines are too tight around him but will not hold him back.

The moon sighs, and breath mists, and spots of blood sling from the ends of coarse hairs to _platt_ wetly in the snow.

He runs; he runs forever; he runs the way he and the dog ran, with the howl unsung between them and the world spread before, untouched and unseen and unbreakable. It is all they wish to be, all they wish to find, all that disappears when the morning comes and the moon dies and they are boys and not gods; when they cease to scent the wind; when Odin's familiars fade back into children. There is a sting in that moment, when the night steals back its majesty—but that moment has yet to come, and now, for now, for this moment, the pale, frozen world ripples for miles beneath his feet, the black silk sky unfurled above, and it is his to drink and to drown in.

He wants to live; he wants to reign; he wants to kill. Nothing is safe, least of all the man inside him.

—

When he opens his eyes, he becomes blurrily aware of a patchwork quilt in a thousand colors faded by a familiar pair of conspirators: time and sunlight. There is blue beneath his white hands, a blue that was ocean-colored once and is snow-shadow now; he sees pale sage green and the desperate hope of purple dots on white; and he knows where he is.

He raises his head, and she is standing just there, with her arms crossed, the yellow lamplight flooding from someplace behind, framing her face and her pale hair with a blinding halo.

_No wings,_ he thinks. _My angel has no wings, and that is as it should be._

If she was complete, a man in pieces couldn't love her quite as well.

She scares him, because he always moves on, because he always has, because it's how he understands things and how he survives—because everything is temporary, but she beams permanence and winks truth, and that's not playing fair. Because _she_ changes; because she is a creature of mutability, of colors and characters, because she is vibrant and unforgettable. Because he could worship her and probably does. Because she makes him want to run, but he knows he'd never get away.

The pale-dark Earth-sky is always and ever in her eyes. He can't escape her, because he can't escape everything, and she _is_ everything, everything and the world.

"I heard you last night," she says, "and this morning I found you by the door."

Of course she did; of course he came here; the obviousness throbs in his temples, and she must know. People forget her intelligence to focus on her form. They see the potential, which eclipses the person.

He doesn't delude himself thinking that he is special, or superior, or worthy. He's just lucky that way. It's a gift he doesn't ask for, but there's no less joy in receiving it.

He looks at her. "Admires" smacks of voyeurism, so he only looks.

"I'm sorry," he says, and he knows that she knows that he means it.

"It's all right," she responds, and it's his turn to believe.

_This morning_ is what she said—it must be morning, after all. He has time to think about it, and it must be true. The sun is so faint that the windowpane gleams white instead of yellow, and his hands atop the quilt bask in no glow of warmth, but it must be morning still.

He runs a fingertip along the sewn seam between a pink patch and a gray one. That's not very subtle. He imagines that she's touched it before, wondering wryly who had the precognitive gall to leave such a statement on the very coverlet.

He thinks that he should stay here, that he belongs here, that two people wrapped in patchwork quilts might just understand each other. He has tried to make her hate him, and he has tried to let her go, and the two tasks are equally impossible.

Why isn't happiness a choice?

"I have tea," she says, and perhaps it's a peace offering, though he doesn't know for what.

Perhaps it's just an offering, and he should stop thinking in terms of war.

—

He doesn't think he wants to ask why she has her father's bathrobe, but she tells him anyway—it's terribly comfortable, and it makes her feel safe.

He can understand that, and he has only small, guilty objections to donning terrycloth that belongs to her father and smells of her.

They sit at her kitchen table, and he curls his toes on the cold linoleum. The teacup tries to burn his palms pressed around it, but he doesn't care. He must look grayer than ever—listless, bloodless, pale; he must be disappearing in the white robe, there against the tiles, flimsily illuminated by the prematurely weary sunlight—but she talks of cheery things, and her eyes make the room orbit her, and he thinks of something else.

He thinks perhaps he has been running _to_ something all along.


End file.
